Redfern marks Keating speech, 20 years on

Aboriginal elders gathered in Sydney to mark the 20th anniversary of Paul Keating's Redfern speech, considered one of the most important addresses in Australia's history.

Speaking to a crowd at Redfern Park on December 10, 1992, the then-prime minister acknowledged the impact of European settlement on Indigenous Australians.

The speech put reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians firmly on the political agenda, and some say it paved the way for the formal apology to Indigenous Australians.

"It was we who did the dispossessing; we took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life," Mr Keating said in the speech.

"We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion.

"It was our ignorance and our prejudice, and our failure to imagine that these things could be done to us."

Gail Mabo, the daughter of the late land rights activist Eddie Mabo, read extracts from the speech at a Sydney gallery on Saturday to mark the anniversary.

Speaking before the event, she told Saturday AM the speech kicked off change in Australia.

"It's one that people should actually look at and reflect on, because the words he was saying in that, it reflects that issue of change, but it's a thing of through small things, big things will happen," she said.

"But change will happen. It mightn't be right here, right now, but it's just changing people's attitudes, and that's what he was doing with this speech.

"He was trying to get into people's heads that it is time for change."

She says 20 years on, many things have changed for Indigenous Australians, but more can be done.

"I think baby steps have happened, but we still need to gain a bit more momentum and still recognise and appreciate the first peoples," she said.

"It's the understanding that Indigenous people were the first people here and you have to acknowledge that, and it's only through those little things."